Engineers and Autism

I found an opinion column, Engineers and Autism, about engineers and autism in the online edition of IEEE Spectrum, a professional publication for engineers, in my daily Google alert for Aspergers last week. I have read reports that the incidence of autistic spectrum disorders in Silicon Valley is higher than average. An article, When Engineers' Genes Collide, talks about a new theory that links systemizing, engineers, and autism in the October issue of IEEE Spectrum. In this article, I found a link to a study being conducted by the Psychology Department of Cambridge University.

Here is their description of the study:

Theories of brain development have linked spatial, scientific and mathematical ability to a number of factors, such as handedness, sex, and likelihood of having a child with talents (such as artistic or musical ability) or developmental delays (such as in language, or social development). This study is asking parents about themselves and their children to test these theories.

From the October article on IEEE Spectrum:

The theory’s author, Simon Baron-Cohen, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge, in England, points to inborn mental proclivities, which are set to different levels in different people. At one pole lies the systemizer, who attends particularly to those aspects of the world that form regular, repeatable, law-governed patterns. At the other lies the empathizer, who focuses on nonrepeating events that can be understood as the actions of agents—other minds comparable to our own.

Baron-Cohen posits that people fall into eight categories of systemizing. Those in the first category give little attention to law-governed patterns; those in the eighth give attention to little else. A level-eight autistic person can spend all day staring at the blades of a rotating fan and will either ignore or retreat in horror from any change in a stereotyped routine.

Mathematicians score the highest on the scale; Engineers score 3 or 4 on the scale; someone with Aspergers or a similar disorder will score 6 or 7.


My husband and I volunteered, and here are our results:


Adult Questionnaire B - The EQ
Mom: 34 Dad: 43

Men usually score about 42 and women score about 47.
0 – 32 is a low score, 33 – 52 is an average score,
53 – 63 is a high score and 64 – 80 is a very high score.

This questionnaire measures empathising.
Empathising refers to the ability to identify
and respond appropriately to another person’s
thoughts and feelings. The higher your score,
the more empathic you are. The maximum score is 80.

Adult Questionnaire C - The SQ

Mom: 95 Dad: 89

Men usually score about 64 and women score about 54.
0 – 36 is a low score, 37 – 78 is an average score,
79 – 99 is a high score and 100 – 160 is a very high score.

This questionnaire measures systemising.
Systemising is the drive to understand the
rules governing the behaviour of a system
and the drive to construct lawful systems.
The higher your score, the better at
systemising you are. The maximum score is 160.


I filled out questionnaires about our sons, ages 9 and 3, but the results were not available to me. I was surprised that I scored higher on systemizing and lower on empathizing than my husband, especially since we suspect that he has Aspergers (he was not at all surprised). Our results make me wonder where I fall on the
systemizing scale.